Electronic mail, also commonly referred to as “email” or “e-mail”, is increasingly utilized as an electronic form of communication via the Internet. A user can send an email as a text message with optional attachments from a client device to a designated recipient. Although email is used primarily to communicate and to transfer files, Web-based email is increasingly used as a repository for pictures, video, and other types of data that is specific to a particular user. For example, a user on vacation can email his or her vacation photos to a personal email address to store the photos until returning from vacation.
Current email applications and Web-based email systems indicate whether an email includes an attachment, such as the vacation photos, by displaying an icon (e.g., a paperclip or other indicator) next to the email on the user interface display. Before opening the actual email, however, a user will not know how many attachments to the email that there are or what kind of file type(s) the attachments are, and will not be able to see or identify the content of the attachments.
Current email systems also enable a user to sort received emails by various fields associated with properties of the emails, such as the name of the sender of an email and the date and/or time an email was received. Emails can also be sorted such that emails received with attachments appear at the top of a list, while emails that do not include an attachment appear below the others in the email list on the user interface display.
These basic email list features are not sufficient to search, view, and organize attachments that may be included with received emails. Current systems can only recognize the existence of an attachment to an email. A user may not be able to locate a specific attachment unless he or she can recall and locate the email message that includes the specific attachment. The user may have to open each individual email and attachment to locate the specific attachment that he or she wants to find.
Accordingly, there is need to provide for searching, organizing, viewing, and managing the numerous attachments of varying file types that email users receive as attached files to emails received from multiple sources.